The call for entries for the 2026 Cecilia Castaño Awards is now open. Promoted by the GenTIC research group at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya since 2022, these awards recognize research from any academic discipline that addresses gender inequalities in science and technology and advances knowledge on women’s participation in STEM fields.
Eligible submissions include doctoral theses, master’s degree final projects, and academic articles linked to doctoral theses or master’s projects. Works can be submitted in English, Catalan, or Spanish, until 16 November 2026.
The candidate with the best doctoral thesis or article linked to a doctoral thesis will receive a cash prize of €2,400, and the candidate with the best master’s degree final project or article linked to a master’s degree final project will receive a cash prize of €600.
Find out the guidelines for the Cecilia Castaño awards and how to participate here: Catalan/Spanish, English.
For any questions, email Gender and ICT at gentic@uoc.edu.
About Cecilia Castano
Honorary professor of Applied Economics at the Complutense University of Madrid (Faculty of Political Science and Sociology). In 2006, she created the Gender and ICT research programme at the UOC’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). That same year, together with Juan Martín Fernández, María Ángeles Sallé (Fundación Directa), Susana Vázquez y José Luis Martínez Cantos, she launched the e-Equality Observatory of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), which for five years produced annual reports on the digital gender gap, the participation of women in the information society (La segunda brecha digital, 2008; La brecha digital de género. Amantes y distantes, 2009) and different annual reports of the e-Equality Observatory that each year addressed a specific topic. Her research work has had a social impact on the promotion of initiatives and political actions for gender equality both in the digital field of information and communication technologies and in the field of science and technology (STEM). Throughout her career, Cecilia Castaño has led the creation of various training programs with a gender perspective at the university level. She is currently a member of the Gender Gap Advisory Council of the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, which was created in 2024 to advise on public policy decisions falling within the Ministry’s remit from a gender perspective, particularly those aimed at reducing the gender gap.